Update on things (Patreon)

Hey everyone, sorry there was no update last week! I wasn't intending to skip it, it just sorta happened - you ever have that problem where you mean to respond to a message from someone, but you forget, and then hours later it feels weirdly late and awkward to respond, so you wait more, and ultimately end up not responding at all? It's that sorta thing. I really need to work on that lol, another thing to bring up with the eventual therapist.

So the new medication, the non-stimulant ADD pill, hasn't really made much of a difference for me unfortunately - I haven't felt any side effects really, but also no real benefits. Some basic googling tells me that non-stimulant medications tend to be much less effective at treating ADD, so I'm not too surprised by it, it just means I need to get that EKG done so we can figure out if taking a stimulant would be safe for me.

I haven't really done any work yet, but there has been one.. let's call it interesting.. development, that doesn't really pertain to CPE itself but will be relevant for my future games. It won't really change anything on your end as players, but the engine that I work with recently announced they're shifting their pricing model, and instead of being one-time purchases, they're going subscription-only. Personally, I can't stand subscription-only business models for programs, especially not ones you have to use for your job, so basically I'm ditching it and moving to a new engine lmao. CPE will be finished in the current engine, so it's not going to affect that - they're honoring all previous permanent licenses, so nothing is changing for me in the immediate future - but when they inevitably release a new version of the engine it'll be subscription-only, and I ain't dealing with that. I've been tinkering with Godot a bit the past week, and it's super promising, so I'm strongly leaning towards changing over to Godot for future games. It's completely free and open source, so there's no risk of them pulling shit like this in the future.

Anyway, aside from the engine stuff and the medicine not really helping, things have been going pretty well thankfully. I've been trying to cook a little more and eat a little healthier (key word: a little), and once Puffernutter's ankle heals (she got a pretty bad twisted ankle about a week ago), we plan on starting up exercise again. I still feel bad about not getting anything done for CPE, but it's felt good to focus on real life for a bit, now that my mental state has evened out a lot more.

CPE hasn't been completely idle, though; Orexius has been powering through more and more xray animations, and we now have xrays for the tentacles, warped sentries, scientists, and poison alraune. Red has officially finished up the Azulisk CG, too. I still haven't sent scripts off to our VAs yet, so I plan on doing the little remaining script work I have over this next week, so I can send it to them and give them time to record. I meant to do that several weeks ago, but yeah, things weren't going so great several weeks ago. I have a friend visiting from out of town this week, so I'll be spending some time with them, but they're not going to be here 24/7 so I'll definitely have time to do a bit of writing.

I also have two doctors' appointments this week, one of which is a followup with my medication doctor, so I'll be able to find out if I can afford that EKG or not. Even if I can't afford it now, I'll be able to in the near future - I finally picked out a therapist and sent them an appointment request this week, though it was only a few days ago so I haven't heard back yet. Knowing that I'll be seeing a therapist weekly, I intend on getting on insurance as soon as the enrollment period opens. Irritatingly, one of the enrollment periods just closed like.. a week ago, so it'll be a while before I can sign up for that, but in the worst case scenario I'll be able to afford the EKG once I get that going. Because of the nature of insurance and deductibles and shit, I plan on going crazy with medical care in 2022, and trying to get all sorts of my issues figured out. I haven't really talked about any of it, but I have loads of minor physical problems in addition to the mental ones; it's all stuff I've learned to live with, but it would be lovely if I could sort it out, so that'll be a big goal for next year.

Alright, I've rambled just about enough for two weeks worth of personal updates, huh? Sorry again about missing last week, I'll try not to let that happen again in the future. Thank you all so much for continuing to read these updates, even when they're not really about the game! Sometimes it's easy to forget how many people are following my work, since comments are usually pretty quiet when things are going well, so I really appreciate all the comments and well wishes you guys have been sending me regularly. It makes this whole thing feel like it matters a lot more, and has me looking forward to the day when I can not only get back to work, but can do that work better than I ever could in the past when I was struggling with all this. See you all again in next week's update!